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Bridport Prize 2001
Poetry Judge - Maura Dooley
Over the years I have been asked to judge a number of
competitions. The Bridport Prize this year attracted nearly 4,500
poems and I have never had to read quite such a large number of
poems in such a relatively short time. I read each one
carefully.
When I settled down to a pattern of reading, I was unprepared
for the way in which these poems would seep into my conscious and
unconscious states. I was haunted by the shades of other people's
pasts. My dreams began to gather in images from the poems. many
poems simply made me sit and weep. Often these poems were not
what we might call 'art' but the plainest statements of despair,
loneliness, tragedy or tremendous courage in the face of
difficulty.
I was astonished by how few poets used rhyme. By far the
majority were writing in free verse. There were a few sonnets and
villanelles, no rap, hardly any experimentation with language,
use of dialect or the shape of words on a page. Yet here were
boxes full of poems so varied in their approaches and so
wide-ranging in their subject matter that my greatest difficulty,
of course, was in choosing one poem over another.
Some poets explored small subjects intimately, not many took
on what we tend to think of as 'big' public themes. There were
few political poems, for example, but many splendid, slow
unwrappings, detailed examinations of the minutiae of crises
points - birth, death, illness, loss. Others took up well known
historical figures (Mallory, Mary Shelley and Wordsworth were all
popular this year!) or gave voice to figures from the margins, a
cabin boy from the Titanic, a model from a painting by Vermeer.
There were many poems which used fairy tales, classical mythology
or archetypes as allegory. In other work it was interesting to
see the ways in which particular voices in contemporary poetry,
and in particular fashions in subject matter, had been taken up:
Carol Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney, Jo Shapcott and Simon Armitage
echoed through some of these pages. But there were more whose
voices were unique, particular and memorable.
Once I was down to my 'long list', the final 80 or so, I found
it increasingly difficult to feel that one poem was somehow
'better' than the others. Each of those poems was so much more
than competent. In the intensity of a vision, a memory, or
perception made vivid by the careful and surprising choice of a
word or image, in the miraculous music of a lyric, in deft and
poignant argument, in the cadence of a rhythm somehow capturing
an emotional truth: for their many different strengths I'll
remember those poems. Not one of them was put aside easily. I
wish all of them could be in the anthology. That said, I am proud
of the final group of poems here and I hope that you will enjoy
reading them. More than that, I hope that you will be moved,
comforted, made to see something afresh, as I was.
 | The Bridport Prize is a fundraiser for Bridport Arts Centre, charity no 1069780 |